A Debunker Debunked

The late Stephen Jay Gould was both an evolutionary biologist and a popular essayist. In the book The Mismeasure of Man he argued that scientists unconsciously manipulate their data to fit their preexisting prejudices. As evidence he cited the work of Samuel George Morton, a 19th century physical anthropologist who assembled a large collection of skulls from many parts of the world and measured their cranial capacity in an attempt to answer questions about racial differences. According to Gould, Morton skewed his data in various ways to fit his racial beliefs.

I have just read an article by a group of modern anthropologists who went over Morton's data and remeasured many of the skulls that Morton measured—something Gould did not do. The authors concluded that most of Gould's criticisms were poorly supported or falsified. The errors that Gould reported in Morton's analysis resulted from errors by Gould, not by Morton. Morton did make some mistakes in his work, but they were in the opposite direction from his biases. Thus, for example:

Morton’s three most over-measured skulls are an Egyptian Copt that Morton considered "Negro" (+12%), a Seminole (+8%) and a "Native African Negro" (+7%).

The obvious conclusion, not stated by the authors of the article, is that Gould's central claim was correct. Scientists sometimes bias their work to fit their preconceptions. As Gould demonstrated by doing so.

The article fit a conclusion that I long ago reached about Gould on other evidence—that he misrepresented the work of people he disagreed with, taking advantage of the fact that since he was a widely read popular essayist and they were not, most of his readers would never read either the work he was attacking or any response that the authors might make. In this case he took further advantage of the fact that the man he was slandering was no longer alive to reply. 

For evidence in another case, here is a response to Gould by Tooby and Cosmides. And here is a perceptive comment on Gould by someone with whom, on other subjects, I often disagree.

How Much Does Control of the Senate Matter?

In the weeks leading up to the election, the key question everyone focused on was whether or not the Republicans would get control of the Senate. It was never clear to me why that was supposed to be so important. As long as the Republicans control the House, the Democrats cannot pass any bills that the Republicans are solidly against. As long as the Democrats control the White House, Republicans cannot pass any bills that the Democrats are solidly against unless they have large enough majorities in both houses to override a presidential veto, which they were not going to get.

I do not want to overstate my case. A Republican majority in the Senate means that Obama cannot appoint judges, in particular Supreme Court judges, that the Republicans are solidly opposed to. It means that the Republicans can pass popular legislation that the Democrats oppose and force Obama to either sign it or veto it. It might make it possible to override a veto of popular legislation with the help of a few Democratic legislators. But the bottom line for legislation is still what it was. Nothing can get passed if either party is solidly opposed to it.

Which brings me back to my theory of why people vote. It isn't to change the political outcome, since any reasonable person knows that, in a large population polity, his vote has virtually no chance of doing that. It's for the same reason people go to football games—to cheer for their side.

In order to have a game you need some definition of winning and losing. In order for it to be interesting, the definition has to leave the outcome in doubt. If winning the midterm elections was defined by whether or not the Republicans retained their majority in the House or by whether they gained enough seats in both houses to override a presidential veto, it would have been a very boring contest, since the answer to both questions was known long in advance.

Viewing it as a contest over who ended up in control of the Senate, on the other hand, made it a game worth watching.

Memories of Gordon Tullock

Gordon died yesterday. We were colleagues at the Public Choice Center at VPI and I have affectionate memories of him. Some bits and pieces ...  .

Gordon gave the impression that he read every book that was published. As best I could tell, he was bluffing about half the time.

Like George Stigler, he was sharp tongued but not, so far as I could tell, in the least malicious. The best advice he gave me was that the one part of the submission cycle you can control is the time your article spends on your desk. 

My wife remembers meeting him when she was my girlfriend. He started the conversation by asking why she was wearing a backpack. Her interpretation was that the only form of conversation he knew was argument, he only knew two things about her—that she was my girlfriend and that she was wearing a backpack—so he flipped a mental coin and chose the backpack. He never made the common mistake of thinking that an argument was a quarrel.

One chapter of the recent third edition of my first book is based on something I published when I saw an opportunity to argue, in print, that something Gordon had written was both obvious and wrong. Anyone who knew him will understand that it was a temptation I could not resist.

The last time I saw him was an event at George Mason a good many years ago. I told him that I had heard he was publishing a book of his rejected articles. He smiled and nodded. So I asked when the first volume was coming out.

I will miss him.

A Modern Orwell

In a recent post I commented on a piece by a blogger who posts under the name of Scott Alexander. I have now read quite a lot of his posts and find both them and him fascinating. He is someone who identifies more nearly with the left than with the right but can be ferociously (and intelligently and entertainingly) critical of aspects of left wing culture. He is sufficiently open to ideas he does not agree with to offer a brilliant, even persuasive, summary of reactionary arguments. He is interested in a very wide range of subjects and says intelligent things about all of them

Start with the page of top posts. It includes a grim and persuasive description of why the worst place in the world to die is a hospital—he is a doctor. It includes evidence of how hard it is to do scientific research right and how frequently we do it wrong. Also a description and defense of Polyamory. And a great many other things.

All of them, so far, worth reading.

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P.S. Reading more of Alexander's posts, I came across a paragraph in one of them that struck me as a nice example of his writing style:

Tables 10 and 11 turn out to be a gold mine – I worried the records of exactly who took the tests would be lost, but as you might expect of someone who basically invented statistics single-handedly and then beat Darwin in a debate about evolution as an encore, Galton was very good at keeping careful data.

Good News for Libertarians

I have long argued that the real function of libertarian involvement in politics, including the Libertarian Party, is not to get libertarians elected. It is to get libertarian policies to the point where the major parties will find it in their interest to adopt them—the strategy followed with striking success by the U.S. Socialist party over the first half of the 20th century.

Which is why I was delighted to see a recent piece on Reason's blog in which a Democratic politician argued that libertarians ought to vote for Democrats because they were more nearly in favor of libertarian policies than Republicans. Another piece on the Reason blog, two days earlier, reported Rand Paul  arguing that libertarians should vote for Republicans because they are more ...  . 

A competition I can appreciate.

Climate: The Implication of Uncertainty

Anyone who looks seriously at climate issues should recognize that the consequences of climate change are very uncertain. My own view is that they are sufficiently uncertain to raise serious doubts about the sign as well as the size of the effect, that warming due to human production of greenhouse gases might well make us better off rather than worse off. Even if I am wrong and the effect is almost certainly negative, how negative it will be is very uncertain. CO2 emissions might fall sharply due to increases in the cost of fossil fuels or decreases in the cost of alternatives. For a given value of emissions, varying estimates of climate sensitivity imply at least a factor of two range for the resulting temperature. For a given increase in temperature, the effect on humans depends on what humans will be doing for the next century. Diking against a meter of sea level change could be a serious problem for Bangladesh if it happened tomorrow. If Bangladesh follows the pattern of China, where GDP per capita has increased twenty fold since Mao's death, by the time it happens they can pay the cost out of small change.

A possible response to this point is to argue that uncertainty is no argument against action. One simply replaces the uncertain range of outcomes with the best estimate one can provide of its expected value, the average of costs weighted by their probability, and acts as if that were the known consequence of warming. If the estimate of expected cost is ten trillion dollars, then any precaution to prevent it that costs less than ten trillion is worth taking.

It is a possible response and a popular one, but it is wrong for a reason that ought to be obvious to (at least) economists. The question we are answering is not "what should we do?" but "what should we do now?" Waiting may raise the cost of dealing with the problem but it will also provide additional information. The more information we have, the better our ability to decide what precautions are worth taking. Or not worth taking. Uncertainty that will be reduced over time is an argument against immediate action.

The usual rhetorical response is to claim that we barely have time to act at all, that if we wait more than a very short time it will be too late. This claim becomes less persuasive the more times it is made, and it has  been made, by various people, quite a large number of times over the past twenty years or so. It largely depends on picking some arbitrary temperature change, most commonly two degrees C, and treating it as if it were the end of the world. As salesmen commonly put it, "Buy Now—This Is Your Very Last Chance To Take Advantage of Our Special Offer."

For a more realistic opinion, consider an estimate of the cost of waiting by William Nordhaus, an economist who has specialized in climate issues. In the course of a piece arguing for immediate action against climate change, he reported his estimate of how much greater the cost of climate change would be if we waited fifty years to deal with it instead of taking the optimal action at once.  The number was $4.1 trillion. He took that as an argument for action, writing that "Wars have been started over smaller sums." 

As I pointed out in a post here responding to Nordhaus, the cost is spread over the entire world and a long period of time. Annualized, it comes to something under .1% of world GNP.

"Thought before action, if there is time."
(quote from a character in a Dick Francis novel)

And there usually is.

A Case of Posthumous Conscription

A recent Forbes article is headlined "What Would Milton Friedman Do About Climate Change? Tax Carbon." It reports on a forum at the University of Chicago at which several economists, including Michael Greenstone, described as the "Milton Friedman Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago," argued that Friedman would have supported a carbon tax. The evidence for that claim was a 1979 clip from the Phil Donahue show where Milton Friedman argued that if the government is going to do something about emissions, they should use an effluent tax rather than direct regulation. He does not actually say that government should do something about emissions, only that there is a case for doing so and, if it is done, the best way to do it is by a tax on emissions.

To get from there to the conclusion that he would have favored a carbon tax requires at least one further step, a reason to think that he would have believed that global warming due to CO2 emissions produced net negative externalities large enough to justify doing something about them. The problem with that claim is that warming can be expected to produce both negative externalities such as sea level rise and hotter summers and positive ones such as longer growing seasons and milder winters. The effects will be spread out over a long and uncertain future, making their size difficult to estimate. My own conclusion, defended in past posts here (one example), is that the uncertainties are large enough so that one cannot sign the sum, cannot say whether the net effect will be positive or negative.

I do not know if my father would have agreed but I have at least a little evidence on the subject, more than offered in the Forbes article. The same issue arose in the earlier controversy over population. Just as it is now routinely assumed that warming is bad, it was then routinely assumed that population increase was bad. Forty years ago I wrote a piece on the subject for the Population Council in which I attempted to estimate the  externalities associated with population. I concluded that they were too uncertain for me to tell whether the net effect was good or bad. My father read the piece and commented on it. If he had disagreed he would have said so, and he did not. It is possible that he would have felt differently in the case of climate change, but I can see no reason to expect it.

The article quotes professor Greenstone on the uncertainty:

Estimating the cost is tricky, Greenstone said, but scientists and economists have models for projecting the cost of each added ton of carbon on agricultural losses, mortality, sea-level rise, storm surge, and other climate effects.

It’s a complicated task but I think the best evidence suggests that it’s probably around $40 a ton,” he said. The U.S. government has projected the cost of carbon emissions at $37 per ton.

Current estimates of climate sensitivity, the effect on temperature of an increase in CO2, vary by more than a factor of two. One would expect the size of the externality due to an additional ton of CO2 to increase with the temperature increase. A further uncertainty, reflected in the various scenarios of the IPCC report, is the amount of CO2 that will be emitted over the next century. Lockheed Martin has recently claimed that it will have a working fusion reactor in the near future. I have my doubts that it is true, but if it is, the result should be to reduce CO2 emissions over the course of the next few decades to between half and a quarter of what they would otherwise be. That would sharply reduce warming and thus the cost of additional CO2.

One would expect similar effects from any substantial reduction in the cost of other alternatives to fossil fuels, such as nuclear or solar power, or from a substantial increase in the cost of fossil fuels due to the exhaustion of the more readily accessible sources. Additional uncertainties are associated with the relevant climate science. The IPCC, for example, claimed in its fourth report that warming increased drought, retracted that claim in the fifth report.

Whether or not my view that we cannot sign the externality is correct, I would be very surprised if Professor Greenstone could justify his confidence in the specific number he offered—which happens to be close to the official government estimate. I would be equally surprised if he could offer evidence that Milton Friedman would have taken seriously a government estimate of an uncertain number offered in support of a policy the current administration favored.

Before they died, my parents created a foundation to promote the idea of school choice. One of the terms on which they created it was that the foundation was to end a fixed number of years after the last of the founders died. The reason for that was my father's concern, possibly based on the examples of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, that once the founders were no longer around their names would be used in support of policies they themselves would not have supported.

Of all my father's accomplishments, I believe the one he was proudest of was his role in ending military conscription. I do not think he would be happy to be conscripted, posthumously, for someone else's cause.

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P.S. Robert Murphy points at evidence against the claim that my father would have supported a carbon tax. In a 1999 comment to a recently published book, he wrote:

This encyclopedic and even-handed survey of the evidence of global warming is a welcome corrective to the raging hysteria about the alleged dangers of global warming. Moore demonstrates conclusively that global warming is more likely to benefit than to harm the general public.

It is possible that between then and now he would have reversed his view, but I can see no reason to expect it.